Play on the mother-ground: children’s games in rural Odisha

Abstract

In rural northern Odisha, children’s outdoor peer play is a pervasive, though barely considered, form of village activity. This essay foregrounds elementary school-aged children’s play as a form of social interaction with landscapes. Specifically, it examines how children at play develop embodied experience and knowledge of place vis-à-vis adult constructions of space and place. The article draws on ethnographic research with children from paddy cultivator and forester families to answer questions around how the village environment and its core resources and symbolic motifs shape play and how peer play shapes children’s sense of their environment. Earth, or soil, for instance, was found to have a central place in both adult-determined productive and symbolic spheres, as well as in children’s imaginative play and games, highlighting connections between the symbolic motifs of a wider spatial context and the internal spatiality of children’s play. As well as a site of symbolic continuity, children’s play was found to be both an index and a site of transformation within Odishan villages. First, as environments change, so do the central motifs and resources with which children play – for play is foremost an exercise of adaptive flexibility. Second, games were found to provide rural young people with an open-ended context within which to develop their own peer responses to their social and spatial circumstances through dialogues, arguments, embodied exchanges and critical sense-making, which accompany their play. These, in turn, impact and transform local spatial contexts, by imbibing them with generational significances. The study raises important questions for further research into the play-environment connection.